Welcome to ChitChat. I am the mother of four children and a writer of children's literature trying to make sense of it all. Join me as we talk about family, children, education, current events and GREAT BOOKS!

My Mission Statement

I write to serve, to unite, to educate. I write to share literature and flesh out ideas that may be of interest to others. I write to document an emotion, experience, or a blip in time. My mission is to write in such a way that the reader is reminded that we can find humor in all situations. It's one of the great blessings of life.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Things to Ponder and Redneck Skiing Tips

My husband and I recently made a journey to Towson, Maryland. It was a lovely old town, reminded me of Chesterfield a bit, but something about it really caught my eye. Of all the buildings we passed (aside from the hospital and college), the largest most beautiful building I saw was the Board of Education. It was housed in a lovely and stately old plantation home, pillars and all, with stunning grounds and a big, inviting driveway. When have you ever seen that? It almost made me want to move there because when a community puts the education of its children first, has an inviting Board of Education, pours money and attention into the leaders of its schools, that's a community doing something right. That's a place I want to be. I only glimpsed it for a moment as I passed although I did slow to get a good look, but I've thought about it often. As a parent, as an American, what can I do to push our public schools to excellence? A town is only as good as its public schools. If a town has a problem with its public schools, that's just symptomatic of a larger problem in the town. A friend of mine, a high school teacher, once said to me that schools improve when parents demand improvement. So how do I do that? Of course, I'm very involved and try to be supportive of my children's teachers (and with four kids, I have a relationship with a lot of teachers-ha), but what else? It makes me crazy sometimes living in a small rural area. My kids have had some great teachers, don't get me wrong, but they just don't have the course offerings I had at this age. Another thing I want to share. My husband and I had a kind of stressful couple of weeks for a variety of reasons all coming together in the perfect Bermuda triangle. We were blessed enough to get to leave for a few days last week, although part of the trip was a necessity, we turned the other part into some desperately needed couple time. Now you all know I love the beach, but I fell back into love with skiing this past week. I hadn't been snow skiing in years, and we only went for two days, but it is truly the perfect antidote to stress. When you're shushing down a steep slope with slippery sticks attached to your feet, it is IMPOSSIBLE to think of anything else. You can lose yourself in survival or technique, depending on your level of expertise. Redneck Tips for Skiing1. Study the slope map before you get ON the slopes, so you know where the hell you're going or you might, hypothetically speaking, end up in the middle of a bunch of 'bitchen snowboarders'FLYING down a hill steeper than you planned to undertake in your life.2. Learn to stay up because getting up after you've fallen down is really hard, and it's hard to yell to people flying by to ask for help, not to mention embarrassing.3. Don't drink any beer until the END of the day or you're too tired to go on.4. Don't wear a scarf or it might get tangled around one of your skis and make you fall down in a very awkward, twisted kind of way.5. Recognize that EVERYONE is wearing ipods, so they can't hear you coming even if you say 'Excuse me' really loudly.6. Always end the day with a hot bath to ease the sore muscles.7. If you loosen the buckles of your ski boots, it's WAY easier to walk around before and after the skis are attached to them.

Have a great week, everyone. Hit your local Epiphany service tonight and spread the love. xoxoR